She eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she joined the famed comedy improv troupe The Groundlings and worked alongside Phil Hartman and Paul "Pee-wee" Reubens, honing her comedic skills. Then a chance encounter with her idol Elvis Presley changed the course of her life forever and led her to Europe, where she worked in film and traveled Italy as lead singer of an Italian pop band. Run-ins with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tom Jones helped her grow up fast. While her sisters played with Barbie dolls, Cassandra played with model kits of Frankenstein and Dracula and idolized Vincent Price.ĭue to a complicated relationship with her mother, Cassandra left home at 14, and by age 17 she was performing at the famed Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas.
Feeling like a misfit led to her love of horror. Burned and scarred, the impact stayed with her and became an obstacle she was determined to overcome. Third-degree burns covered 35 percent of her body, and the prognosis wasn't good. On Good Friday in 1953, at only 18 months old, 25 miles from the nearest hospital in Manhattan, Kansas, Cassandra Peterson reached for a pot on the stove and doused herself in boiling water. The woman behind the icon known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the undisputed Queen of Halloween, reveals her full story, filled with intimate bombshells - and told by the bombshell herself. I never pictured myself hovering above Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter, facing a pack of wild dogs in Bulgaria, or playing an aging Elvis Presley with cancer on his penis - how can you predict this stuff? The sheer lunacy of show business is part of the fun for me and I hope you'll come along for the ride. If that sounds tame, the journey from Evil Dead to Spider-Man to Burn Notice was long, with plenty of adventures/mishaps along the way. Taking stock in the overall quality of my life, I fled Los Angeles and moved to a remote part of Oregon to renew, regroup and reload. This next book, an “Act II” if you will, could be considered my “maturing years” in show business, when I began to say “no” more often and gravitated toward self-generated material.
My first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a "B" Movie Actor, was published back in 2001 and it chronicles the adventures of a “mid-grade, kind of hammy actor" (my words), cutting his teeth on exploitation movies far removed from mainstream Hollywood. One of my dad’s favorite jokes about getting older was: “I went out for coffee when I was twenty-one and when I got back I was fifty-eight!” I get what he meant now.
0 kommentar(er)
